Page 378 - Xara Designer Pro X17

378 Photo Handling

smoothing turned off when zooming in, so you can see the pixels are very large zoom
factors.
• If you’ve opened a JPEG photo file as a photo document, when you save changes
your JPEG file will be overwritten. See Editing Photo Files below for details.

In all other respects Photo Documents behave like normal Xara Designer Pro X
documents. You can use all the normal drawing and text tools as usual. If you want to
create a photo document of a given size, you can alter the "canvas" or page size by
selecting "UTILITIES" > "OPTIONS" and the "PAGE" tab and entering the required
dimensions.

In Photo Documents two extra controls become enabled. The PREVIOUS and NEXT button
will move onto the Previous or Next image in the folder from which this image was
opened. This will close the current image, so you may be prompted to save the file.

Editing Photo Files

You can use Xara Designer Pro X to easily edit your JPEG photos and save back the
modified JPEG. And unlike with most photo editors, you can do this multiple times
without loss of quality, even though the JPEG format is a lossy format. That’s
becauseXara Designer Pro X is able to save your edits in a lossless way, along with the
original photo. Here’s how it works.

First open the JPEG, using "FILE" > "OPEN", drag and drop, or in Windows File Explorer
right click and choose Xara Designer Pro X from the "open with" list. The photo is opened
as a Photo document.

Edit the photo using the PHOTO TOOLS as described above.

If you then do "FILE" > "SAVE" ("Ctrl + S"), the JPEG file you loaded will be overwritten
with the modified image. However by default Xara Designer Pro X also saves your photo
in its native .xar format. This file is placed into a "Masters" folder alongside your JPEG
file. It has the same name as your photo file but with a .xar extension. The .xar file
includes within it your original photo without the modifications applied, and of course
details of your edits.

In future if you load the modified JPEG file in order to edit it further, Xara Designer Pro X
will look in the Masters folder to see if there is a .xar file available for that photo. If so, the
.xar file is loaded instead of the JPEG file and you can continue editing from where you
left off. When you next save, the JPEG file is again overwritten and an updated .xar file
also saved into the Masters folder.
Of course if you don’t want to overwrite your original JPEG file with your changes, you
can use "FILE" > "SAVE AS", to save the modified photo elsewhere, or use the many export
facilities to export your photo into different formats.